Blackbird PPC

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the COO of an AI company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

An AI go-to-market platform that builds autonomous digital workers for B2B sales, growth, and marketing teams.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Blackbird PPC to accomplish?

• Drive more and higher-quality sales meetings from paid acquisition
• Improve efficiency of ad spend, primarily on Google Ads
• Build our LinkedIn Ads program from scratch - we had no prior experience on the channel

SOLUTION

How did you find Blackbird PPC?

Referral

Why did you select Blackbird PPC over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Blackbird PPC were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Blackbird managed our paid acquisition program across Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads on an ongoing basis.

On Google, they took over our existing account with a mandate to improve efficiency: restructuring campaigns, tightening keyword and match-type strategy, cutting wasted spend, refreshing ad copy and landing page alignment, and optimizing toward qualified sales meetings rather than raw leads or clicks.

On LinkedIn, they built our paid program from scratch - audience and account targeting, campaign structure, creative and copy, budget pacing, and ongoing testing - since we had no prior experience on the channel.

Across both channels they owned conversion tracking setup, regular performance reporting, and recurring reviews with our team where we assessed results and reallocated budget.

Beyond the two core channels, part of their mandate was experimentation: testing new channels to figure out where our spend would be most efficient. That included running YouTube Ads tests and a few campaigns on Meta, with the goal of identifying which channels actually produced pipeline for us before committing real budget.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

They delivered on every goal we set. All of our core paid acquisition KPIs improved over the engagement: more qualified meetings booked from paid, lower cost per meeting, and significantly better efficiency on Google Ads spend. LinkedIn went from zero to a functioning, measurable program that now contributes pipeline. The channel experiments on YouTube and Meta gave us a clear, data-backed picture of where our dollars work and where they don't, which has directly shaped how we allocate budget going forward.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Communication was truly excellent and a real differentiator. They were extremely responsive - questions got answered the same day, often within minutes, and if something in an account needed attention they flagged it before we noticed. Reporting was consistent and clear, and they never buried bad news; when a test wasn't working they said so and reallocated.

The other thing that stood out is that they treated our dollars like their own. They were quick to recommend cutting spend that wasn't producing, pushed back when we wanted to scale something before the data supported it, and never tried to grow the budget just for the sake of it. That kind of discipline is rare in an agency and is a big part of why we trusted them to run experiments on our behalf.

What was your primary form of communication with Blackbird PPC?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Two things. First, the strategic thinking. Most paid agencies are execution shops - you hand them a budget and they manage bids. Blackbird thinks like operators. They came to us with a point of view on which channels we should be in and why, pushed us to run real experiments instead of guessing, and were willing to tell us to spend less when the data said so. They treat your money like it's their own, which changes the entire dynamic of the relationship.

Second, they are just great people to work with. We actually looked forward to our time with them. That sounds like a soft point, but when you're working with an agency every week for an extended period, it matters a lot - and it's a big reason the relationship has lasted.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Blackbird PPC could have done differently?

Nothing comes to mind, to be honest. They delivered on what we hired them for and were a pleasure to work with throughout.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the VP Marketing of unitQ

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

unitQ is the AI quality intelligence platform that unifies every customer signal into one system, connects it to your most critical business metrics, and tells every team exactly what to prioritize — before your KPIs move. Built on six purpose-built products in one platform, unitQ gives organizations everything they need to detect issues the moment they emerge, understand their business impact, benchmark quality against competitors, evaluate every support interaction, uncover qualitative insight at scale, and act on what customers are saying across social — all from a single source of truth. The result: product, engineering, CX, and leadership teams stop working from fragmented tools and different versions of customer reality — and start making faster, more confident decisions grounded in what customers are actually experiencing right now. The products millions of consumers love every day — including Pinterest, Adobe, PayPal, and Bumble — trust unitQ to close the gap between what customers experience and what companies know about it.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Blackbird PPC to accomplish?

• Build a predictable paid pipeline of sales-qualified leads and demos for unitQ's AI customer intelligence platform through LinkedIn lead gen and ABM, Google Search, and Meta, and support go-to-market for new product launches.

SOLUTION

How did you find Blackbird PPC?

Referral

Why did you select Blackbird PPC over others?

• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Blackbird PPC were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Blackbird has managed unitQ's paid media program since early 2023. We're a B2B SaaS company selling to product, support and CX leaders at enterprise accounts, and they ran demand gen across search and paid social. Scope of work:

• Paid search management on Google Ads — brand, competitor and non-brand campaigns
• Paid social management on LinkedIn Ads, including message ads, single-image and document ads
• Meta Ads, added as a test channel in late 2025
• An exploratory test of ChatGPT ads when the platform opened to advertisers in 2026

Key deliverables:

• Account strategy and structure build across all channels — campaign architecture, ad groups, budget allocation and bid strategy
• Keyword research and ongoing management, including match types, negative keyword lists and bid adjustments
• Audience development on LinkedIn — matched account lists, target account list uploads, title and skill-based targeting, and exclusion lists
• Ad copy development, including responsive search ad repositories (15 headlines and 4 descriptions per ad group) and LinkedIn message ad copy with sender setup
• Creative production for paid social, including static image and document ad assets
• Conversion tracking implementation — conversion actions in Google and LinkedIn, LinkedIn Insight Tag, and Google Tag Manager configuration
• Lead gen form builds and field mapping into HubSpot
• Weekly performance reporting, delivered as a recurring deck, plus a live dashboard for self-serve reporting
• Ongoing campaign optimization and new channel testing
• Campaign build for our product-led growth launch of unitQ Research in 2026

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Delivered a consistent, predictable flow of inbound leads and demos while staying on budget, with lead quality reviewed alongside unitQ's marketing team every week.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project management was steady and low-maintenance, which is exactly what you want from an agency when you're a small team. The weekly cadence never slipped. A performance deck landed every week without me chasing it, and standing check-ins happened on schedule for three and a half years. Over that long a stretch, consistency is its own achievement — most agencies drift after the first year. Responsiveness was their strongest trait. When I came to them mid-week with a question about pacing, a new campaign idea, or a request to shift budget, I got a real answer quickly — not a placeholder. When we asked them to spin up a test in a new channel, they moved on it. When we asked them to scale spend down, they did that just as willingly, without friction or a pitch to keep the budget where it was. That last part is rarer than it should be. Flynn and Ethan were our day-to-day contact and was consistently great to work with — organized, direct, and easy to get hold of.

What was your primary form of communication with Blackbird PPC?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Two things stood out. The first is staying power. We worked with Blackbird for three and a half years with the same core team throughout — no account manager churn, no rebuilding context every eight months. Anyone who has worked with agencies knows how uncommon that is, and how much time it saves not having to re-explain your business every time someone rotates off. The second is genuine depth in B2B paid social, not just general PPC competence. LinkedIn is unforgiving — expensive clicks, brutal audience math — and they knew it properly: matched account lists, layering title and skill targeting, building exclusion lists so we weren't paying to reach our own customers or partners. That's craft knowledge you only get from running a lot of B2B accounts, and it's not something you can hire into a small in-house team overnight.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Blackbird PPC could have done differently?

I'd also encourage them to push clients toward reporting that connects spend to pipeline, not just lead volume and cost per lead. We had strong channel-level reporting, but the question we actually needed answered — which campaigns produce leads that become deals — required joining ad data to our CRM, and that's a conversation I'd have wanted an agency to start with us rather than one we arrived at ourselves.